A multi-engine, instrument rated pilot, James Wynbrandt has been an AIN and Business Jet Traveler contributor since 2003. His in-depth reporting and insightful features have won more than a dozen editorial honors, including two National Business Aviation Association Gold Wing Awards (2019; 2021), and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Barron’s, Fortune, Forbes, and Smithsonian Air &amp; Space. He has flown his Mooney M20K 252 on assignments throughout North and Central America and the Caribbean. Wynbrandt is also the author of Flying High (Wiley &amp; Sons), a biography of Jet Blue founder David Neeleman, as well as histories, references works, and books on a variety of other topics from major publishers. He lives in New York City.

Contributor - Business Aviation

James Wynbrandt

“The anonymity in today’s large carriers where you don’t fly with the same people” puts airlines at more risk for rogue pilots than business aviation, where “we fly with the same people, which allows us to keep an eye on people in our organization,” Thomas Anthony, director of USC’s aviation safety and security program, said on Friday at the Flight Safety Foundation/NBAA Business Aviation Safety Seminar in Austin, Texas. During his presentation, “Human Factors in Extremis: The Rogue Pilot Phenomenon,” he specifically discussed aviation’s most unsettling accident cause: pilot murder-suicide.

 


Should Malaysia Airlines MH370 join the identified cases of last year’s German Wings Flight 9525 and 2013's Air Mozambique’s LAM470, “Then you would have three [pilot murder-suicide] primary causes of fatal commercial accidents in three successive years,” said Anthony. “I think that’s significant.”

 


Unlike “accidents based on wreckage, this brings us into an area of the profiler of criminal behavior, and the psychology of murder-suicide—a very different area of inquiry,” he noted. “Murder-suicide is premeditated; it’s not out of the blue.”

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